Adirondacks, The Frontier, and the Pastoral Ideal

In Russell Banks' novel Cloudsplitter, on page 198, Owen Brown recounts the arrival of Richard Henry Dana: a writer and abolitionist from Boston who had gotten lost in the wilderness below what is now called Mt. Marcy. The real Richard Henry Dana wrote a book that described being taken in by John Brown and his family, and the novel from Owen Brown's perspective describes Dana as idealizing the Brown family for settling down in the wilderness. He looked up to them as the "ideal American Christian yeomen"--echoing what we now think of as manifest destiny, and the scramble to find uncharted lands in the West. It is easy to forget that the Adirondacks also had completely uncharted land in the 19th century, and that people settling there faced just as many hardships as those trying to move westward.

In a course I took last year, "Interpreting the American Environment", we talked a lot about what we called the "pastoral ideal". In short, the pastoral ideal was that the United States could ultimately be a nation of farmers, and people who settled down on a plot of land and built a life for themselves, rather than grouping together into crowded cities. The reverence that Dana had for the Brown family, and his connection between living off of the land and being an "ideal American" was an interesting connection to the mindset of the rest of the country at this point in history, and the image of America as a country of people coexisting with "wilderness".